Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

3.30.2014

The Films of 2014: Nymphomaniac (Volume I)

“Perhaps the only
difference between me and other people is that I've always demanded more from
the sunset.” So says Joe
(Charlotte Gainsbourg), the heroine of Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac, the first of two volumes of which has recently
been released theatrically here in the U.S. She’s speaking to Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard), a quiet,
middle-aged stranger who has brought her back to his home after discovering her
lying battered and bruised in a nearby alley. Like a foundling in an eighteenth-century novel, she
proceeds to recount her life story to Seligman, whose bed doubles as a
therapist’s couch. Joe’s narrative is a sexual picaresque, the first half of
which spans her earliest sexual memories to a chance reunion with her first
lover, Jerome (Shia LeBoeuf). Joe
self-identifies as a nymphomaniac; the operative word in her statement about
the sunset is “more.” But she’s
less certain about whether her insatiable sexual appetite has brought her more
pleasure than pain.

It’s a question that Seligman,
who gently punctuates Joe’s narrative with interjections, questions, analogies,
and interpretive hypotheses, tries to help her to answer. The intellectual, sexually
non-threatening Seligman functions as an interlocutor, a psychoanalyst, a
father figure, and a foil for the more libidinal, intuitive Joe, for whom the
pursuit of sexual knowledge provides a primary means of understanding the
world. (She translates his
mini-lectures on such topics as fly-fishing and music theory into sexual
terms.) It soon becomes clear that
Nymphomaniac owes as much, if
not more, to continental philosophy (Sade, Freud, Foucault) and the canon of
highbrow erotic fiction (Bataille, Genet, Nin) as it does to Debbie Does Dallasand Xtube. It’s firmly embedded in a long tradition
of works in which representations of sex lend themselves to the theorization of
more abstract concepts of power and pleasure, mind and body, the self and
others.

That is to say that Nymphomaniac is audaciously, almost cheerfully over-determined. It invokes psychoanalytic theories of
child sexuality and the Oedipus complex; eighteenth-century literature and
philosophy; the tropes and mise-en-scene of 1970s porn; Edgar Allan Poe, Andrei
Tarkovsky, and even von Trier’s own films (shots of the cosmos lifted from Melancholia, Bess’s red vinyl hot pants from Breaking the Waves, etc.). Like Joe herself—who
may, after all, be read as a portrait of the artist as a young woman—von Trier
has always practiced the belief that more is more, at times to his
detriment. But even when his excesses don’t work, they’re still
interesting. Nymphomaniac is no exception. Its
pleasures come precisely from watching von Trier and his actors throw
themselves headlong into the mess of human sexuality, which is rendered as
grim, arousing, funny, scary, and mysterious by turns. If only more films (and filmmakers)
were as willing to explore this territory so ambitiously.